Free A Summer to Remember by Mary Balogh Page A

such a dunce. I never did understand all that archaic language.”
    “There,” Lord Ravensberg murmured. “Your excuse to escape my lascivious clutches has just been presented to you, Miss Edgeworth. If you sit beside me, as you are invited to do, you may find me whispering naughty nothings into your ear all evening and touching you in places I ought not to touch you under cover of the darkness.”
    His words were shockingly outrageous. They were meant to be, she realized, just as his lavish praise of her beauty had been meant to provoke rather than deceive her that day in the park. She would not show her indignation. She would merely be playing into his hands and affording him amusement, she suspected. Though why it should amuse a man like him to goad someone like her she did not at all understand.
    “If I had wished to escape your clutches, my lord,” she told him, “I would have remained at home.”
    “Provocative words indeed,” he murmured before stopping outside one of the boxes and opening the door.
    A couple of minutes later, having been introduced to Lord Farrington, Miss Janet Merklinger, and Mr. and Mrs. Merklinger, the young lady’s parents, Lauren seated herself on a velvet-covered chair at the front of the box even though Wilma, still in conversation with Mrs. Merklinger, tried to snatch at her arm to detain her.
    Viscount Ravensberg took the seat beside her.
    Despite all her good intentions Lauren felt a prickle of awareness along the arm closest to him and a stirring of anticipation that felt very like excitement. If he should be forward or impertinent or otherwise outrageous, she would deal him a sharp setdown. She almost looked forward to pitting her wits against his.
    Life was usually so very dull and predictable.
     
    She sat, as he expected, without touching the back of her chair with any part of her spine. But it would be inaccurate to describe her posture as ramrod straight. There was an elegant arch to her back. Indeed, there was grace in every line of her body. A disciplined grace, that was. And perhaps an unconscious one. Certainly she watched the play with all her attention, her hands motionless in her lap, her closed fan clasped in one of them.
    Kit watched her.
    Did she realize that he did so? Had she noticed the considerable stir of interest their entry into Farrington’s box had aroused in the pit and the other boxes? Numerous quizzing glasses and lorgnettes had swung their way, and heads had moved together in that way people have when exchanging gossip. There had been a flurry of talk, of course, when he had driven her in Hyde Park the day after dancing with her at the Mannering ball—particularly, according to Rush, over the fact that he had borne her off along one of the shadier paths instead of completing the social circuit with her. But two weeks had passed since that occasion with nothing to fan the flames of speculation.
    She seemed oblivious to the interest she had aroused. She turned her attention away from the stage only when the first act ended.
    “I had forgotten,” she said, “what it is like to watch a live performance of a play. One forgets one’s very existence, does one not?”
    “I have not been watching the play,” he confessed, deliberately lowering his voice.
    Her lips compressed in an almost imperceptible expression of annoyance, and she opened the fan in her lap. Clearly she understood his meaning. Equally clearly she still did not approve of his form of light flirtation. He did not approve of it himself. He was capable of far more effective subtleties. But he found it amusing to discover how far he could push her before she lost her cool control over her temper—and to discover too what would happen if ever he could push her so far. Was there anything interesting behind the cool façade?
    Everyone else in the box had risen. Farrington was bearing Miss Merklinger off in pursuit of a glass of lemonade. Her parents, very correctly, were following closely